


The House Amid the Brambles

by LauraDoloresIssum



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 04:25:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16527314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraDoloresIssum/pseuds/LauraDoloresIssum
Summary: In the dark distance, a light. Not a campfire. A trap of the Entity's, or a reason for hope?





	The House Amid the Brambles

I wasn’t sure where I was, if I ever had known in the first place. I couldn’t even see the painfully hopeful glow of a campfire in the distance. I trod heel-to-toe, staying close to the ground. No telling what could be hunting me right now. At this point, death would be a welcome, temporary reprieve from the constant knot of terror in my stomach, but every time I tried to reconcile myself to it, the familiar terror of pain pushed me forward anyway. The cycle was endless and exhausting. The eyelid-dragging desire for sleep, the animal resistance to what would come before, and back and forth and back and forth. No matter how many times I died that dull insistence on surviving remained, even if only for a few more moments until I was inevitably found.

My breathing was harsh in my ears, but I seemed to be the only living thing around. The forest was eerily still and empty, not even a crow. No telling if the gigantic figures (everyone had their own names for them, but I tended to think of them just as the Hunters) were around, or something worse, but I wasn’t nauseous and my heart wasn’t trying to jump out of my chest, so they couldn’t be too close. You learned to track the Hunters by the increasing rebellion of your body as they approached, accompanied by an unexplainable mounting feeling of pants-shitting terror. And once you had spent your first time on a hook, you knew why.

I glimpsed a light. Firelight, maybe? Perhaps even several fires close together, it looked strong and steady. I crouched near the base of a tree, hesitant. Was it a trap? You couldn’t put anything past the Hunters, and I already had a knot of phantom pain in my chest where I anticipated a hook plunging in. Eventually I decided what the hell. What was the worst that could happen? I moved toward it slowly. I was still fairly new, or perhaps just a slow learner. The Hunters almost always caught me; I didn’t have the skills to evade them. I tended to spend most of my time outside the faint protection of the campfires just scrounging for resources and then praying I wouldn’t die or drop them on the ground before I found another fire and had a chance to regroup. My only chance was to not be noisy and to keep close to cover.

As I moved closer I realized it was a very large house, just sitting in the middle of the woods. It had a Victorian, faintly New England feel, the kind of house with a roof like a Cubist sculpture and a million little twiddly wood bits that have to be maintained every year and involve dangerously high ladders. There was a wraparound porch and about a hundred windows, real windows with glass. They were covered by identical floral curtains, through which shone a warm yellow glow. I hung back, too afraid to get any closer. It wasn’t the sputtering, flickering light that meant temporary safety (until you ran out of wood) or the harsh white fluorescents that the Hunters sometimes left on inside their territory, hoping to lead people indoors. I searched the dim outline of the house for the shape of hooks, cleverly concealed amongst the whittlings, and found none. I crouch-ran as fast as I could up to the porch door, pulled it open (thank God the hinges didn’t squeal), dove facefirst down onto the floor, and waited. When my heart didn’t feel ready to burst and no black spots began to pulse behind my eyes, I sat back up. Everything looked the same. I tried the front door. It was unlocked.

 There were other people standing in the front hall. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I knew who they were; there was only the Hunters and the Hunted in this place. Their faces were haggard and their clothes were stained with dirt and blood. They looked around as I came in, seemingly not knowing what to do. There was a blue runner on the floor, an endtable with a ceramic swan, and bright gaslamps at regular intervals. The house felt calm, and warm, and so ordinary that I was at a loss. Time as I understood it had not existed for… a long time, but it felt like so long ago that I had seen a house that I was just in shock. We all just kept turning, staring at the furnishings and the walls like we were expecting them to just disappear. The hallway emptied out into a small foyer-like area with an oak staircase and a small, high endtable. Sitting on the table was a brass bell. Hanging from the banister above it was a sampler that said: “ _To call your gracious Host, please ring the bell_.”

We stood around silently for a long time. We looked at each other with identical tired eyes. Eventually, someone rang the bell, and we all flinched at the sound.

After a few moments, a humanlike figure descended from the staircase, with a blank, featureless white mask instead of a face. Their body was thickly looped with various sizes of black iron chains; they had no other clothes. As though we were one single-minded animal, we all drew back, but I wasn’t getting any of the usual signals that the Hunters gave off. It stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and emphatically put a long, chain-wound finger to where its lips would be. It seemed to be looking at us, somehow. It tapped its finger on a glass light fixture, shook its head, then put both hands above where its eyes would have been, tapped its nonexistent mouth, and nodded. After a moment of confused staring, we understood. We shouldn’t speak in the light. It waved a hand to indicate all of us, then pointed upstairs, and gestured us to follow. We did.

It walked with a certain elegance like a waiter at a formal restaurant, lifting its chains above the stairs like a lady’s skirt. It brought us to a large tiled room with rows of shower stalls, and waved at them. A few people set down toolkits and bags, but hovered, uncertain. I realized I no longer remembered how to bathe, and I had been here far shorter than some of the other Hunted. The memories seemed to belong to a past life.

The Host impatiently stepped into a stall and turned on the water, miming cleaning itself, running its hands between the chains and through its black hair. I could clearly see the thick thread that attached its mask to the flesh in front of its ear, and realized how unforgiving the curve was, seeing it from the side. It would never fit if the wearer had a nose or a pair of lips. Perhaps there was literally nothing underneath. One by one, slowly, the Hunted moved into the stalls. Some of them shut the curtain, others didn’t. Some didn’t remove their clothes. I stood under the hot water dazedly, eventually remembering what I was there to do. I didn’t even remember finishing or getting out. When I put my clothes back on, they were clean.

Some kind of amazing smell lured us out of the room and back down the stairs. We entered the dining room, where the Host was laying out plates of food. I didn’t recognize any of it and didn’t care. When we all stood around the table, not sitting or moving, the Host gently pushed plates into our hands. The meat didn’t taste like it was human. If we wanted more, we would wordlessly hand our plate to the Host, who would leave and reappear mysteriously with them fully loaded again. I hadn’t actually felt hungry until this very moment, when I realized I hadn’t eaten for… a very long time.

When everyone was finished, the Host led us into the parlor, where the cots were. We needed no instruction this time. We lay as close together as possible, almost huddling on the floor, trying to obliterate ourselves within the mass of other human forms. The Host briefly clapped its hands twice to get our attention, and put a hand to its chest, then pointed up, jerking its finger to emphasize _up_ twice. It held out an arm and pointed to the hallway where the bell was. Then it left. As we heard the gentle clanking of it going up the steps, all the gaslamps in the house abruptly went out and thick darkness descended like a shroud.

Sound was dangerous, and we had learned to communicate without speech most of the time. But there was no way to do so in total darkness. And despite myself, this place felt so _safe_. I felt myself relaxing into the cot.

“Where are we?” asked a woman from somewhere on my left. Her voice, like all of us, was hoarse with disuse.

“All I know is, I had a broken leg when I got in the shower. Now I don’t.”

“I’ve heard stories about this place,” said somebody else. “They say it appears to random Survivors sometimes. A safe haven. But they only let you stay a night.”

“I’ve heard about the Host,” said a voice near the far wall. “People call it the Proxy or the Visage. They say it was too vicious even for The Entity, and has to earn back Its favor by taking care of Survivors in penance. Every link of its chains represents one of the people it murdered, and when the last link finally disappears it’ll be allowed to join the rest of the Killers again. Get the thrill of the hunt back finally.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s just what I’ve heard,” said the voice apologetically.

“It’s true,” said someone else. “It even killed me.”

“No, it didn’t, Bob!”

“No, he’s right. It was taller then, and had a tuxedo. And tits. It was like a tree monster.”

“No, it was already covered in chains, and leather, and it had stripped part of its skin off.”

“I’ve just heard that the Proxy was the first Stalker The Entity ever created. It would just kill you right there on the spot, you wouldn’t even know what had happened, just sudden death in various new and exciting ways. But then The Entity got bored. Or maybe it decided it gets off on pain. And that’s when the hooks started popping up.”

We were silent for a while.

“Do you think we can actually sleep?” I asked. My eyelids felt very heavy.

“I’d be willing to give it a try,” said the man next to me.

I rolled over and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. Bodies pressed against my front and my back. I woke up alone by to a campfire, next to a toolbox that didn’t belong to me. I felt better than I would have believed possible. I felt strong, and ready to face whatever would come for me when my fire inevitably died. Whatever my stay in the house had done, it would last at least a little while longer. I opened the toolbox. It was empty. One more joke from The Entity, I guess.

The Proxy closed the hatch to the attic behind it. Below it, the humans were drifting off to sleep. It could smell their bodies through the wood. It moved to the worktable, where various lengths and types of barbed wire were spread across the tabletop. It picked up some and pressed it around its own flesh, shaking the chains apart until it found a patch of skin. Too thick. It tried another. Too dull to cause much bleeding, but it was very uncomfortable. After some thought, it selected that one and dumped the others into a drawer. An acceptable amount of struggling would make some gashes. It looked out the window, where it could see the other Killers prowling in the moonlight. It knew they were looking for the house. They would never find it.

The Proxy raised its gaze to the unending skyline of trees, far past the little patch they were all confined to with the scattered sites like the corn maze and the hospital, beyond where the briars grew too thick for even the Killers to pass, and surveyed the endless pure forest extending in all directions, waiting to be filled with creative ways to drink in blood. And if the Proxy had one thing that all the others lacked, it was creativity.

It held up its arm, where black blood with just a hint of red in the center was welling up, thick like molasses. Steel arrows, spring-loaded and trailing barbed wire would do the trick of holding victims in place, and kill them slower than a hook. And if they were dangling, if any loose generator wires happened to connect to the metal… the Proxy made a note to balance durability and conductivity. There were plenty of metals from the auto wreckers or the dump to test its theories, some of which it wasn’t sure were natural at all. The first time it had tried introducing more than three elements at a time, the humans had become confused. Killing them had become too easy. But it had plenty of space, and infinite lives to refine its tactics on. The Entity would be pleased by its efforts.

It considered going downstairs and taking a sample victim now. They would never notice one fewer in the dark. But it was quiet and dark now, and the house was full of the vibrant silence of a dozen sleeping bodies filling its rooms. They were supposed to have their rest every now and then, it made the suffering last longer. The Proxy sat down, and pulled out a paperback novel. Perhaps they all just appreciated a change once in a while.


End file.
